They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

The thing that I can’t promise is that heaven exists. I like to hope that it does, despite growing less and less connected to an idea of a higher power with each year. My mother died without knowing that death was coming for her, and I like to imagine her somewhere comfortable, a place where she can make peace with that. Selfishly, and more than anything else, I’d like to see her again, whatever seeing in the afterlife might look like. I’d love to sit across from her and hear her laugh at something, anything. I’d like to tell her about the summer of 1997 while someone sits behind us and plays a horn, slow and beautiful. I’d like to tell her about how I went outside for the first time two days after we covered her casket in dirt and heard the notes to a song she could sing along to. I’d like to tell her that I played basketball late into the night that summer, with the words to that song fresh on my tongue. That the radio played rap again, even in the suburbs that I hated. I’d like to tell her that I did not cry at the funeral, but I didn’t dance either. Not until weeks later, when I finally let go and flailed my limbs to the radio behind a closed bedroom door, crying and singing, feeling myself get closer and closer to freedom with every unhinged movement. You should’ve seen me, I’d tell her in our new and clean heaven. You should’ve seen me. I did, she’d say. I always did.